I'm willing to give Quantic the benefit of the doubt here this isn't what the whole game will be like by any stretch. As with Quantic's odd adapting of typical video game shooting, at the end I was left unsure of the overall point of traipsing the well-worn footsteps of gaming's military shooters, or that Quantic's approach to it felt distinct in a satisfactory way. Often the demo focused on the drama of war around Jodi, but to say it stood out from anything Call of Duty or Battlefield has had to offer would be a disservice to those series.
Nonetheless, exposition was limited across the 20 minutes. One memorable scene saw Jodi and Salim lay next to each other in the back of a pick-up truck, with the young operative almost motherly as she gently stroked Salim's hair while keeping an eye out for danger. Salim accompanied Jodi throughout, and even though exposition was limited in the demo, Quantic's excellent motion capture enhanced the pair's dynamic. Also attempting to provide poignancy was Salim, a young Somali boy forced to take up arms. The decision to shoot or not was left up to me, although both scenarios do play out with no shot being taken. It must be said there was intensity in the demo, from the constant surrounding presence of death to a moment where, wounded and looking like she was done for, a sobbing Jodi placed her gun under her chin. If there was a statement being made by aping conventional shooter controls, it was lost on me. These particular cues didn't reappear in the demo, so their inclusion here felt strange on reflection. The game then led me through shooting an enemy, complete with Heavy Rain-like Simon Says cues: hold L1 to pull the gun out, press R1 to take the shot – like any military shooter, but minus the aiming. %Gallery-191353%Almost immediately, I saw my warpaint-covered Ellen Page likeness sprint behind cover. In contrast, Beyond's Somalia demo offered 20 minutes of war-based intensity, and at times it outwardly resembled the medium's bevy of military shooters. While it had its share of action, those sequences were smaller parts of bigger scenes, and not necessarily what defined them.
Heavy Rain often placed itself in the more normal, human situations that games tend to avoid. Quite how Jodi and her accompanying supernatural entity 'Aiden' came to this point is unclear, and that's fine Quantic Dream has a curious life story in mind for its unusual heroine, and this was a mere portion of the game's ten or so hours. The Beyond: Two Souls demo I played at E3 featured protagonist Jodi Holmes as a CIA operative, undergoing a perilous mission in the war-torn streets of Somalia.